Originally the diary of 4 months spent in Antarctica working as a documentary film sound recordist, this blog has evolved into an online repository for the thoughts, travels and trivia of the writer Richard Fleming. For McMurdo Station, Antarctica, and polar exploration, see August through December of '06. Currently you are likely to find in these pages chronicles of my actual and literary meanderings, as well as notes on my many other passions. Also, did I mention I wrote a book?

If you are worried that a funeral might make for a depressing Sunday beside the gray and so-far unspringlike seashore, you don't know much about New Orleans 2nd lines. Furthermore, Demaria remarks on the facebook invitation page that "This event is symbolic of our hopes for Coney Island's rebirth. It's joyous. And hopeful. And if you don't agree with sarcastic fun we don't want you there."

Despite just how strongly I do agree with sarcastic fun, I unfortunately won't be able to attend. But you should. Surf Avenue and West 12th, at 2PM.

3/26/2011

Spotted on the Rue Capois, Port au Prince, this wall painted with an advertisement for a gender-specific technical school, presumably on the premises. "The Professional Center for Women's Secrets announces its regular classes," including cooking, baking, haircutting and styling, cake decoration and cosmetology.

3/19/2011

The arrival of exiled former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide yesterday in Port au Prince did not provoke quite the same media frenzy as his similar return in 1994, when dozens of journalists thronged the tables along the terrace at the Oloffson Hotel and I met countless people I am still pleased to number among my friends.

Nonetheless, there were journalists at the airport to greet him, and, according to my friend Daniel Morel, perhaps five to ten thousand citizen well-wishers. Although the few mentions of Haiti in the international press yesterday focused on Aristide's return, the bigger story here is the tidal wave of support for Michel Martelly, the former konpa musician turned political outsider. Barring a fraud of monumental proportions, he is certain to be Haiti's next president. Martelly is the closest thing to a local version of a rock star, and the people treat him like one. He enjoys a sort of pre-emptive cult of personality not seen here since Aristide's heyday. At his demonstrations people swoon and raise their arms toward the sky. On the one hand it is tragic to see the Haitian people once more investing their infinite and exuberant faith in a mere mortal, and one with no government experience at that. On the other hand, it is that very exuberant faith that grabs hold of the visitor to Haiti and enchants forever. So the spectacle is both beautiful and depressing, like so much in this country.

For once, I am working on a documentary here that refuses to get caught up in the cyclical vagaries of Haitian political life; the return of Aristide and the cheering crowds of pink-shirted Martelly supporters are things we hear about over dinner at the Oloffson, not experience firsthand. Yesterday, I encountered on the terrace there a television crew who had been at the airport covering Aristide's arrival from South Africa. To my delight, I recognized them and they me; the cameraman and soundman were both alumni of my sound recording seminars at the Siné Lekol in Jacmel. Although both their administrative building and their classrooms were destroyed in the earthquake, often described here as "the events of January 12th," the school's spirit was not. The students immediately set to documenting recovery and rebuilding, filming the living conditions of tent-camp residents and seeking out gripping stories of survival. They have already made countless films.

To see two of my students gainfully employed using the skills I had helped to teach them filled me with pride and hope. Cesar "Bougon" Massena was clutching a boom pole and a shotgun microphone, and threatening my livelihood with his abilities. I couldn't be more pleased.

3/08/2011

I'm safely back in Brooklyn where it is pleasant, but chilly, at least compared with balmy Saigon. All in all it was a fabulous trip to Vietnam, even if I failed to completely miss the winter. I now judge these things by the wealth of blog-worthy images and experiences that I come across, and in this regard Vietnam was extraordinarily rich. So I still have a number of Vietnam-related posts to dole out.

3/02/2011

Cuc Phuong National Park, about three hours south-south-west of Hanoi, is visited primarily by birdwatchers and those wishing to see the Primate Rescue Center, where various gibbons, langours and macaques confiscated from poachers or rescued from cages are rehabilitated with the ultimate goal of reintroducing them into the wild. One of those primates, Delacour's Langour, is among the ten rarest in the world, with less than 200 remaining in their only habitat, the karst limestone jungles of northern Vietnam.

They are not doing well, and we are the principal threat to their survival. (Humans are by far the commonest primate, with over 8 billion of us now having colonized every corner of the globe. We are the Cockroach, Norway rat and House sparrow of the primate world, able to adapt to almost any environment and thrive). Having seen some Delacour's in their cages at the Rescue Center, I decided to try and spot them in the "wild" on my way out of the park. The only place they are regularly found is at Van Long Nature Reserve, a sort of minor appendix to the National Park, some twenty kilometers outside the park entrance. This primeval lake is surrounded by mist-shrouded limestone pinnacles and inhabited by thousands of egrets and herons. It is also what is politely known as a tourist trap.

Turning off the minor highway from Ninh Binh to Nho Quan, one follows a road suitable for tour buses to the lake's edge and finds at the end of it a restaurant-resort complex with too many rooms and overpriced food, and a dozen stalls set up in the dust selling embroidered tablecloths and sun-hats embroidered with the Vietnamese communist star. The only way to visit the lake is to hire a boat. Not a problem; there are countless boats lined up along the embankment and a majordomo who assigns each group their particular vessel and boatman. The price of the boat has already been charged at the ticket desk, saving one the unpleasant task of haggling. (The price is absurdly reasonable, not to say third-world, something like three dollars for an advertised ninety minute tour).

Tourism is, of course, the new colonialism. Here I monkey around taking autoportraits of myself being ferried around Van Long by a diminutive Vietnamese boatlady while she simultaneously scans the hillside for monkeys to show me.

The lake has many boats of many different sizes, ferrying tourists of all nations out onto it, but none of them are motorized, which is blissful, and I appear to be the only one on this particular afternoon who has come to try their luck at seeing the Delacour's Langour, a handsome black monkey with a long tail and, apparently, white shorts. Sightseers are steered east along the lake, while monkey-fanciers bear left, down a spur of the lake trapped between facing walls of limestone. None of the other boats have taken this route, and within minutes of departing the dock I am all alone, surrounded by misty reedbeds and lily-pads. Well, all alone except for the tiny oarswoman valiantly rowing my considerable bulk around in her boat.

The disappointing aspect of visiting Van Long is similar to that of visiting Giverny, where Monet allegedly invented impressionism by painting the waterlilies in his garden. One realizes that, much like Monet, those Chinese painters who painted stylized mountains of dripping rocks, stunted trees and swirling clouds did not actually invent a new way of seeing; instead, they were accurate and realistic painters who sought out, or were surrounded by, incredible landscapes.

Just as soon as we have taken our own route, and the gabble of my fellow dominant primates has paddled out of earshot up the lake, we hear haunting and booming calls coming out of the mountains. They can only be simian in origin. I glance at my guide. She points up into the fog-shrouded rocks above us and whispers conspiratorially to me in Vietnamese. I shrug, uncomprehending. She points again. Does she see something, or is she just indicating the source of the sound? I scan the area of the hillside she is indicating. I see nothing but tortured streaky black and white rock, and vibrant green shrubbery. There are clefts and caves and canyons. The Delacour's could be anywhere up there.

I am certain I hear a return call, coming from the facing rocks to our left; the sound is too present to be the echoes of the first, which we also hear. I point out the other side of the boat. She shakes her head; she does not agree. We row on. She rows on. Egrets by the hundreds flush from the marshes, fly up and around us, and then resettle a hundred meters further along, waiting for us to paddle up and flush them again. Kingfishers zoom above the reeds. I see white-browed crake, and coots, quite uncommon here in Vietnam.

As I'm watching one bird or another the boatwoman whispers again, urgently. She is now pointing to our left, and from her attitude it is clear that she sees something important. I bring up the binoculars and see them immediately, scampering about on the brutal rock face. All black-monkeys with white diapers, almost extinct, Delacour's Langour.

Do you see those two pairs of white shorts, below, in this detail from the image above? With tails extending from them?